To the west of the Manitoba lowland, the land rises in two steps: the Saskatchewan plain, which ranges from 1,500 to 2,100 feet (450 to 650 metres), and the Alberta plain, which is more than 2,500 feet (750 metres). These plains are rolling landscapes of glacial deposits laid over almost horizontal bedrock. In some areas the undulating plains are interspersed with ranges of low hills (glacial......

largest river system of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, rising in the Canadian Rockies of western Alberta in two great headstreams, the North and South Saskatchewan rivers (800 miles [1,287 km] and 865 miles [1,392 km] long, respectively); these cross the Saskatchewan provincial boundary 200 miles (320 km) apart and unite...

...to the saddle after a seven-year absence, captured Thoroughbred racing’s Breeder’s Cup Classic aboard Mucho Macho Man after having ridden to victory on Oxbow in the Preakness Stakes in May. The Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League’s Western Division on November 24 won their first CFL Grey Cup since 2007, defeating the Eastern Division champion Hamilton Tiger-Cats......

Canadian public university in Saskatoon, founded in 1907. It has colleges of arts and sciences, graduate studies, agriculture, veterinary medicine, engineering, law, medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, commerce, education, and physical education....

city, south-central Saskatchewan, Canada, on the South Saskatchewan River. It was founded in 1883 as the proposed capital of a temperance colony, and its name was derived from Mis-sask-quah-toomina, a Cree Indian word for a local edible red berry. Following the arrival of the railroad from Regina (161 miles [259 km] southeast) in 1890 and its amalgamati...

...of simply allowing blacks to participate in white South African society, the society itself needed to be restructured around the culture of the black majority. In 1968 he cofounded the all-black South African Students’ Organization (SASO), and he became its first president the following year. SASO was based on the philosophy of black consciousness, which encouraged blacks to recognize their......

...networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies and employing some 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations (parastatals) controlled industries vital to national security. South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation (SASOL) was established in 1950 to make South Africa self-sufficient in petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel. After the......

...this process was developed and used widely in Germany during World War II, it was discontinued afterward owing to poor economics. It has been in operation since the early 1950s in South Africa (the SASOL process) and now supplies as much as one-third of that country’s liquid fuels....

...first half of the Chosŏn dynasty were members of the Confucian upper class (yangban) and the kisaeng. In the latter part of the Chosŏn dynasty, a longer form called sasŏl sijo (“narrative sijo”) evolved. The writers of this form were mainly common people; hence, the subject matter included more down-to-earth topics such as trade and......

town, northern Free State province, South Africa, south of Johannesburg. Established in 1954, it was built by Sasol Ltd. (the former South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation Ltd.) to house employees at the world’s first oil-from-coal plant producing commercial quantities of oil. The location was selected for its proximity to large coal deposits, the Vaal River, and the Witwa...

Inevitably, a reaction set in, though Bergman continued to make films and direct plays with undiminished activity; and his trilogy of films, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, dealing with the border line between sanity and madness and that between human contact and total withdrawal, was regarded......

a large, hairy, humanlike creature believed by some people to exist in the northwestern United States and western Canada. It seems to represent the North American counterpart of the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti....

Australian special forces unit that exists within Australia’s Special Operations Command. The unit was formed in July 1957 as the 1st Special Air Service Company, Royal Australian Infantry, and it was modeled on the British Special Air Service....

...course, but an outbreak of tribal warfare required them to change their route. In February 1863 they reached Gondokoro in the southern Sudan, where they met the Nile explorers Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass (who later became Baker’s wife). Speke and Grant told them of another lake said to lie west of Lake Victoria. This information helped the Baker party to locate another Nile source,......

one of Africa’s most common and most widespread antelopes. It is a member of the tribe Alcelaphini (family Bovidae), which also includes the blesbok, hartebeest, and wildebeest. Damaliscus lunatus is known as the topi in East Africa and as the sassaby or tsessebe in southern Africa....

...two species, one of which is L. nobilis (sweet bay tree, or bay laurel), a native of the Mediterranean. The leaves of the bay laurel were once formed into laurel crowns by the ancient Greeks. Sassafras, one of the few economically important genera of the family, has two species in eastern Asia and one in eastern North America; oil of sassafras was once used medicinally, and......

(species Sassafras albidum), North American tree of the laurel family (Lauraceae), the aromatic leaf, bark, and root of which are used as a flavouring, as a traditional home medicine, and as a tea. The roots yield about 2 percent oil of sassafras, once the characteristic ingredient of root beer....

(species Sassafras albidum), North American tree of the laurel family (Lauraceae), the aromatic leaf, bark, and root of which are used as a flavouring, as a traditional home medicine, and as a tea. The roots yield about 2 percent oil of sassafras, once the characteristic ingredient of root beer....

highest point in South Carolina, U.S., at 3,560 feet (1,085 metres). It lies in the Blue Ridge (a segment of the Appalachian Mountains) about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Greenville, in Pickens county, on the North Carolina border. Among the streams rising on its flanks is the South Branch Saluda River,...

highest point in South Carolina, U.S., at 3,560 feet (1,085 metres). It lies in the Blue Ridge (a segment of the Appalachian Mountains) about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Greenville, in Pickens county, on the North Carolina border. Among the streams rising on its flanks is the South Branch Saluda River,...

(species Sassafras albidum), North American tree of the laurel family (Lauraceae), the aromatic leaf, bark, and root of which are used as a flavouring, as a traditional home medicine, and as a tea. The roots yield about 2 percent oil of sassafras, once the characteristic ingredient of root beer....

Many other species of Cinnamomum have uses as spices and medicines. Cinnamomum cambodianum bark is used to make joss sticks, which are burned as incense. Oil of sassafras, as much as 80 percent composed of the compound safrole, was previously distilled in large quantities from the bark enclosing the roots of Sassafras albidum (also called S. officinale), a plant......

Shange’s poetry collections include Nappy Edges (1978) and Ridin’ the Moon in Texas (1987). She also published the novels Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), about the diverging lives of three sisters and their mother; the semiautobiographical Betsey Brown (1985); and Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994), a coming-of-age story about a wealthy......

largest ethnic group on Lombok, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia. They constitute most of the island’s population and numbered about 2.6 million at the turn of the 21st century. The Sasak speak Sasak or Sasak-flavoured Balinese, both of which are Austronesian languages. Originally the only inhabitants of Lombok...

The war’s proximate cause was Plymouth Colony’s execution in June 1675 of three of Philip’s warriors. They had been tried and found guilty of murdering John Sassamon, a Harvard-educated “praying Indian” convert to Puritanism who had served as an interpreter and advisor to Philip but whom Philip had accused of spying for the colonists. His murder ignited a tinderbox of tensions......

river in western Africa, rising as the Tienba in the highlands between Odienné and Boundiali, northwestern Côte d’Ivoire, and becoming the Sassandra 36 miles (58 km) east-northeast of Touba at its confluence with the Férédougouba (Bagbé) River from eastern Guinea. It then follows a 400-mile (650-kilometre) south-southeasterly course through Côte d’Ivoire and empties into the Gulf of Guinea at Sas...

(ad 224–651), ancient Iranian dynasty evolved by Ardashīr I in years of conquest, ad 208–224, and destroyed by the Arabs during the years 637–651. The dynasty was named after Sāsān, an ancestor of Ardashīr I....

...mainly for folk-based verse). Campidanese (Campidanian), centred on Cagliari in the south, was heavily influenced by Catalan and Italian. The northernmost varieties of Sardinian—Sassarese (Sassarian) in the northwest and Gallurese (Gallurian) in the northeast—exhibit a mixed Sardinian-Italian typology as a consequence of the encroachment of medieval Ligurian and Corsican......

...mainly for folk-based verse). Campidanese (Campidanian), centred on Cagliari in the south, was heavily influenced by Catalan and Italian. The northernmost varieties of Sardinian—Sassarese (Sassarian) in the northwest and Gallurese (Gallurian) in the northeast—exhibit a mixed Sardinian-Italian typology as a consequence of the encroachment of medieval Ligurian and Corsican......

...short life, Ghirlandaio and his assistants, including his brothers Davide and Benedetto and his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi, produced two major fresco cycles. The earlier was executed for the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita in Florence. Commissioned by Francesco Sassetti, an agent of the Medici bank, they were painted between about 1482 and 1485. The six main frescoes represent scenes.....

...throughout the 18th century, particularly in Britain. Even in Rome itself, however, a number of painters of importance succeeded in remaining more or less independent of the two main camps. Sassoferrato (1609–85), for example, painted in a deliberately archaizing manner, carefully reproducing Raphaelesque formulas. The cryptically romantic movement, centred on Pier Francesco Mola,......

lawyer, law teacher at Perugia, and chief among the postglossators, or commentators, a group of northern Italian jurists who, from the mid-14th century, wrote on the Roman (civil) law. Their predecessors, the glossators, had worked at Bologna from about 1125....

Jan. 17, 1928London, Eng.May 9, 2012Los Angeles, Calif.British hairstylist and entrepreneur who revolutionized women’s hairstyling in the 1950s and ’60s when he introduced short “wash-and-wear” hair that did not demand the weekly trips to the salon and hours of care at home commonly require...

in Hinduism, a deity who is always celibate, generally depicted in a yogic posture, with a bell around his neck. His most-prominent shrine is at Shabarimalai, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where he is most popular, though the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka also house many Ayyappan temples. Ayyappan may bear a histo...

North American Indian peoples that spoke related languages of Hokan stock and lived in the highlands of what is now interior northern California, in the basins of the Upper Klamath, the Scott, and the Shasta rivers. Their main subdivisions were the Shasta, New River Shasta, Konomihu, and Okwanuchu. Formerly included with the Shastan but now often classified separately are the Ac...

...(“The Double Case History of Doctor Valmy”) was performed in Spain for the first time in 1976; the play’s political content made it too controversial to stage there during Franco’s rule. Alfonso Sastre rejected Buero’s formula, preferring more-direct Marxist approaches to social problems, but censors prohibited many of his dramas. A dramatic theorist and existentialist, Sastre in his......

Smarta Brahmans consider themselves orthodox and have tended to rigidly hold the traditional values of Hinduism. They are active in all branches of learning and have earned the honorary title of shastri (Sanskrit: “men of learning”), or, in Tamil, ayyar, which often follows their names....

The earliest available classical dramas are 13 plays edited in 1912 by Pandit Ganapati Sastri, who dug out their manuscripts in Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala state. These, ascribed to Bhasa (1st century bce–1st century ce), include the one-act Urubhanga (“The Broken Thigh”), a tragedy that is a departure from Sanskrit convention, and the six-act......

...village in Tamil Nadu, the bhagavatha mela uses classical gesture language with densely textured Karnatak (South Indian classical) music. Its repertoire was enriched by the musician-poet Venkatarama Sastri (1759–1847), who composed important dance-dramas in the Telugu language. Mohini attam is based on the legend of the Hindu mythological seductress Mohini, who tempted......

...wind, or very hard packed and rough when high winds occur during or after snowfall. Two features are prominent: snow dunes are depositional features resembling sand dunes in their several shapes; sastrugi are jagged erosional features (often cut into snow dunes) caused by strong prevailing winds that occur after snowfall. Sharp, rugged sastrugi, which can be one to two metres high, make......

Armenian folk epic dealing with the adventures of David of Sasun, a legendary Christian hero, in his defense against invaders from Egypt and Persia. The epic was based on oral tradition that presumably dates from the 8th to the 10th century; it was widely known from the 16th through the 19th century and was finally written down in 1873. It is composed in poeti...

Hungarian-born film and television director who gained a cult following for a number of raw, violent, and psychologically disturbing B-movies, notably Pitfall (1948), but was best known to the general public for House of Wax (1953), widely considered the best of the early 3-D films....

...similar to intelligence tests in that they measure a broad spectrum of abilities (e.g., verbal comprehension, general reasoning, numerical operations, perceptual speed, or mechanical knowledge). The Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and the American College Testing Exam (ACT) are examples of group tests commonly used in the United States to gauge general academic ability; in France the......

Japanese writer and feminist whose semiautobiographical works reflected her concern with class struggle; she insisted on forming her own opinions and held fast to them, which twice led to her expulsion from the Japanese Communist Party (b. June 1, 1904, Nagasaki, Japan--d. Oct. 12, 1998, Tokyo, Japan)....

Japanese writer and feminist whose semiautobiographical works reflected her concern with class struggle; she insisted on forming her own opinions and held fast to them, which twice led to her expulsion from the Japanese Communist Party (b. June 1, 1904, Nagasaki, Japan--d. Oct. 12, 1998, Tokyo, Japan)....

...(Sanskrit: “Treatise of the Middle Way”) and the Dvādasá-dvāra-śāstra (“Twelve Gates Treatise”) by Nāgārjuna and the Śataka-śāstra (“One Hundred Verses Treatise”), attributed to his pupil Āryadeva....

Indian family that, according to some interpretations based on the Puranas (ancient religious and legendary writings), belonged to the Andhra jati (“tribe”) and was the first Deccanese dynasty to build an empire in daksinapatha—i.e., the southern region. At the height of their power, t...

Japanese artist who was the most distinguished and individualistic talent among the numerous painters who worked in the style of Sesshū, the 15th-century artist considered the greatest of the Japanese suiboku-ga (“water-ink”) painters....

...the Soviets deployed three MIRVed, liquid-fueled ICBM systems, all with ranges exceeding 6,000 miles and with CEPs of 1,000 to 1,500 feet: the SS-17 Spanker, with four 750-kiloton warheads; the SS-18 Satan, with up to 10 500-kiloton warheads; and the SS-19 Stiletto, with six 550-kiloton warheads. Each of these Soviet systems had several versions that traded multiple warheads for higher......

Sturges went in another direction with his next project, The Satan Bug (1965), a suspense drama about the attempts to recover a deadly virus that is stolen from a top-secret laboratory. The Hallelujah Trail (1965) was a western spoof centring on a cavalry colonel (Lancaster) who tries to deliver 40 wagonloads of whiskey to miners in the face of......

counterculture group founded in the United States in the 1960s by Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997), born Howard Stanton Levey. Contrary to its name, the church did not promote “evil” but rather humanistic values....

...elter (“In Old Age”), which he published in the Warsaw Literarishe bleter under a pseudonym. His first novel, Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray), was published in installments in Poland shortly before he immigrated to the United States in 1935....

Dieterle took a break from biopics to direct Satan Met a Lady (1936), a pallid adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with the characters and material played for laughs. In 1937 he made the crime drama The Great O’Malley, which starred Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart, and Another......

...McCarey’s first comedy in 10 years. It had scattered moments of proficiency, but it failed to capture the madcap humour of Max Shulman’s best-selling book. McCarey’s final film, Satan Never Sleeps (1962), was another anticommunist story, about two intractable priests (William Holden and Clifton Webb) in China who refuse to give ground to the local communists. It was a.....

Olds’s first collection, Satan Says (1980), describes her early sexual life in frank language. The book was praised as a daring, auspicious debut. In The Dead and the Living (1984), which received several major poetry awards, she refined her poetic voice. Her poems honouring the dead encompass both family members and victims of political violence; those addressed to the living......

In his Satanae stratagemata (1565) Acontius identified the dogmatic creeds that divide the church as the “stratagems of Satan.” In the hope of finding a common denominator for the various creeds, he sought to reduce dogma to a minimum....

LaVey set down the teachings and rituals of the church in The Satanic Bible (1969). The church did not worship Satan as the Christian embodiment of evil or even as an existing being. Instead, LaVey taught that “His Infernal Majesty” was a symbol of humanistic values such as self-assertion, rebellion against unjust authority, vital existence, and “undefiled......

pejorative designation used by Robert Southey, most notably in the preface to his A Vision of Judgement (1821), in reference to certain English poets whose work he believed to be “characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety.” Although Southey did not name any of those poets in his preface, elsewhere he identified Lord Byron...

The novel Shame (1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, encountered a different reception. Some of the adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of the Qurʾān in a manner that,......

any of various religious or countercultural practices and movements centred on the figure of Satan, the Devil, regarded in Christianity and Judaism as the embodiment of absolute evil. Historical Satanism, also called devil worship, consists of belief in and worship of the Judeo-Christian Devil and the explicit rejection of...

...Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Kataka. Many braves, unwilling to accept this life of confinement, broke out repeatedly to raid white travelers and settlers. Encouraged by chiefs Big Tree and Satanta, Indians carried out an attack in 1874 that killed 60 Texans and launched the war. In the fall of 1874, about 3,000 federal infantry and cavalry, under the overall command of General William......

Indian family that, according to some interpretations based on the Puranas (ancient religious and legendary writings), belonged to the Andhra jati (“tribe”) and was the first Deccanese dynasty to build an empire in daksinapatha—i.e., the southern region. At the height of their power, t...

...worship Tishtrya conquers him, driving him away “along a path the length of a race course.” At this point Tishtrya causes the cosmic sea to surge and boil, and then another star, Satavaisa (Fomalhaut), rises with the cloud-forming mists that are blown by the bold Wind in the form of “rain and clouds and hail to the dwelling and the settlements (and) to the seven......

Throughout most of Micronesia the maximum independent autonomous political unit was the high island or the atoll, often subdivided into more than one polity. At the time of European contact, Satawan Atoll in the Mortlocks had four separate communities, each with its own leader, which sometimes fought one another. Palau had two confederations of villages or districts, each independent of the......

...in a concerto, it customarily appears immediately above the strings. In vocal works the standard arrangement from top to bottom is soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, resulting in the often-used acronym SATB on the title page of scores for four-part vocal works....

English actress of great ability whose career was subordinated to that of her husband, George Stephen Kemble. Elizabeth Satchell was a talented performer when she married Kemble in 1783, and for several years they acted together, with critics consistently noting her superiority. When engagements took her husband out of town she accompanied him to the detriment of her own career. She outlived him b...

in telecommunications, the use of artificial satellites to provide communication links between various points on Earth. Satellite communications play a vital role in the global telecommunications system. Approximately 2,000 artificial satellites orbiting Earth relay analog and digital signals carrying voice, video, and data to and from one o...

...sequences), (2) families of DNA, in which one gene somehow copies itself, and the repeats are located in small clusters (tandem repeats) or spread throughout the genome (dispersed repeats), and (3) satellite DNA, which contains short nucleotide sequences repeated as many as thousands of times. Such repeats are often found clustered in tandem near the centromeres (i.e., the attachment points for...

India launched its first satellite in 1980 using the four-stage solid-fueled Satellite Launch Vehicle 3 (SLV-3), which was developed from the U.S. Scout launch vehicle first used in the 1960s. India did not have a prior ballistic missile program, but parts of the SLV-3 were later incorporated into India’s first IRBM, Agni. The four-stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was then developed;......

Earth-orbiting spacecraft that allows celestial objects and radiation to be studied from above the atmosphere. Astronomy from Earth’s surface is limited to observation in those parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (see electromagnetic radiation) that are not absorbed by the atmosphere. Those parts include visible light and some infrared radiation and radio waves. The abi...

A telecommunications satellite is a sophisticated space-based cluster of radio repeaters, called transponders, that link terrestrial radio transmitters to terrestrial radio receivers through an uplink (a link from terrestrial transmitter to satellite receiver) and a downlink (a link from satellite transmitter to terrestrial receiver). Most telecommunications satellites have been placed in......

...become very large, and the terminal itself can become uncomfortable and unattractive to use. In order to cut down walking distances, some terminals, beginning in the 1960s, were designed on the satellite concept. Frequently, passengers are carried out to the satellites by some form of automated people mover or automatic train. Some satellite designs were very successful—for example,......

Efforts are now under way to extend and tie together existing continental networks by satellite triangulation so as to facilitate the adjustment of all major geodetic surveys into a single world datum and determine the size and shape of the Earth spheroid with much greater accuracy than heretofore obtained. At the same time, current national networks will be strengthened, while the remaining......

The systems for detecting and tracking ballistic missiles and orbiting satellites are much larger than those for aircraft detection because the ranges are longer and the radar echoes from space targets can be smaller than echoes from aircraft. Such radars might be required to have maximum ranges of 2,000 to 3,000 nautical miles (3,700 to 5,600 km), as compared with 200 nautical miles (370 km)......

...are released as spirants, or fricatives—e.g., the ch in church, the j in jam.) The languages that change the palatal stops to spirants or affricates are known as “satem” languages, from the Avestan word satəm ‘hundred’ (Proto-Indo-European *kmtóm), which illustrates the change. The languages that preserve the......

landlocked country of northeast-central mainland Southeast Asia. It consists of an irregularly round portion in the north that narrows into a peninsula-like region stretching to the southeast. Overall, the country extends about 650 miles (1,050 km) from northwest to southeast. The capital is Vientiane (Lao: Viangchan), located on the Mekong River in the northe...

Nov. 23, 1926Puttaparthi, British IndiaApril 24, 2011Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, IndiaIndian religious leader who was widely revered as a divine incarnation, but critics dismissed his claims of miracles performed, and he attracted scrutiny after allegations of sexual abuse. He claimed as a...